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Artist: Sturtevant
With her first exhibition, which took place in New York in 1965, Sturtevant baffled visitors by reprising recent works by artists Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, all of whom she knew personally. In the years that followed, Sturtevant extended this radical strategy of repeating works – by hand and by memory – by artists including Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Robert Gober and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. She did so to reach, as she put it, the ‘understructure’ of art, and to provoke and challenge – or in her words, ‘push and shove’ – the ways in which contemporary art is produced, distributed and perceived.
In the late 1990s, Sturtevant began working with video, anticipating the digital image saturation we experience today, while countering what she saw as the threat of ‘our cyber world of excess, limitation, transgression and exhaustion’. Her goal was neither to question history nor to denounce our current visual overload. Instead, she used repetition to ‘shift our mental structures’.
This first institutional exhibition in the UK since Sturtevant’s death reveals how the artist’s radical conceptual practice continues to probe the power of images, and to mobilise the basic assumptions of aesthetics and visual pleasure. It samples a broad range of Sturtevant’s work, and includes a gallery of Warhols; a suite of rarely seen Krazy Kat drawings; and Digital Click, a carnivalesque installation where visitors can choose to be photographed sitting on a cutout moon. A rug Sturtevant designed based on a piece by Keith Haring has been made especially for the exhibition.
STURTEVANT – Eat the Outside to Light Up the Inside is curated by Antony Hudek, and made in close cooperation with the Sturtevant Estate and Thaddaeus Ropac gallery.
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